Deborah Blum is the Knight Science Journalism program director at Massachusetts Institute for Technology. Blum is a Pulitzer-prize winning American science journalist, columnist and author of six books, most recently, The Poison Squad, a 2018 New York Times Notable Book, and the subject of a 2020 PBS documentary.

Blum won the Pulitzer in 1992 for a series on primate research that became her first book, The Monkey Wars. She has worked as a science columnist for The New York Times, a blogger for Wired, and has written for other publications ranging from The Wall Street Journal to Mother Jones. After being named the fourth director of the Knight Science Journalism Program in 2015, she launched the online science magazine, Undark, which now numbers a readership in the millions and has won numerous national awards, including the George K. Polk Award.

She  is a former president of the National Association of Science Writers, was a member of the governing board of the World Federation of Science Writers, and currently serves on the board of the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing.